If you are looking for a great spy novel that has some very realistic IT schemes and scenes, I would highly recommend TL Williams’ Zero Day: China's Cyber Wars. The book’s realism took two years for the CIA to clear it (Williams was a former CIA operations officer), and he claims he had very little cybersecurity knowledge before starting to write it.

Researchers have been tracking malicious spam pushing the Hancitor malware, a macro-based campaign spread through Office documents that usually results in delivering a banking Trojan. It is usually detected by Windows 10 Defender, but not on earlier versions of Windows. This post describes how it actually makes money. – UNIT 42 (Palo Alto Networks)

As the Olympics opening ceremony happened last week, organizers have confirmed that a cyberattack happened. The report was slim on details, and no data leaks occurred. The main website was taken offline and users weren’t able to print tickets for about 12 hours, and one stadium’s wireless networks went offline. The organizers didn’t reveal the source of the attack, but Cisco/Talos has analyzed the samples and claimed they were just trying to disrupt the Games. – THE GUARDIAN

Reports

A new Ponemon survey of 1200 IT professionals found that the majority of them aren’t satisfied with cyber threat sharing tools in terms of timeliness, accuracy and the poor quality of actionable information. Some of this has to do with a johnny-come-lately realization that threat intel could have been used to prevent a previous attack.

If you haven’t been paying much attention to all the hubbub about GDPR because you don’t have any EU business, you aren’t alone. David Froud, to his chagrin, had similar thoughts until he realized that he needed to review the regs and understand that a US citizen on holiday in the UK and ordering something online could be subject to the regs, as is a UK citizen on holiday in the States. Never assume! – FROUD ON FRAUD

This article talks about how CIOs will need to unify their teams of physical security and IT security if they want to be successful. There are several ways to bridge the two, such as determining ahead of time a joint vision and strategy, better communication between the teams, and understanding what each team’s goals and responsibilities are. – HELP NET SECURITY

My colleague and podcasting partner Paul Gillin has written a piece about voice recognition programs. Thanks to encryption and tunneling, voice-activated devices are believed to be reasonably secure against compromise at the software level, but what about the commands they accept? Recent research has shown that voice recognition itself can be compromised with unsettling ease. – SECURITY INTELLIGENCE (IBM)

Beginner’s corner

The world’s most popular and longest-living web exploit remains SQL injection, and here is a very solid tutorial on how it is done. It is all a matter of how you place your quotation marks in the URL. Worth reviewing, even for your clueless manager who may think you are protected. And you can read a report about SQLi that I wrote more than a decade ago that is still mostly relevant (if I say so myself). – ACUNETIX BLOG

If you are trying to learn something more than just a few basic SSH tunneling commands, start with this tutorial that will show you how to forward packets from a remote TCP port and other useful command-line options. – TAOS

The Docket

Officers from Ukraine's Cyber Police Department arrested a suspect last week for attempting to sell customer data belonging to his former employer. The suspect tried to sell nearly 100 GB of data he obtained from a financial company that offered loan services to Ukrainian citizens. – BLEEPING COMPUTER